Leo had in his busy brain half a dozen crude plans of simple machines. Often, when he saw people at work, he tried to think how the labor might be done by machinery. As he sat in the kitchen, where Maggie was sewing or preparing the dinner, he was devising a way to perform the task with wood and iron. Only a few days before the illness of the barber, he had seen her slicing potatoes to fry, and the operation had suggested a potato slicer, which would answer equally well for cucumbers, onions, and apples.
Sitting on the bench, he was thinking of this apparatus, when fifteen dollars a week became a necessity. But the machine required more iron than wood work, and he had not the means to do the former, and no capital to invest in other people's labor. Then he turned his attention to a new kind of boot-jack he had in his mind—an improvement on one he had seen, which could be folded up and put in a traveller's carpet-bag. As this implement was all wood except the hinges and screws, it looked more hopeful. He could make half a dozen of them in a day, and they would sell for half a dollar apiece. He was thinking of an improvement on the improvement, when the stampede of the mice deranged his ideas; but they gave him a new one.
White mice were beautiful little creatures. Their fur was so very white, their eyes so very pink, and their paws so very cunning, that everybody liked to see them. Even the magnificent Mr. Checkynshaw had deigned to regard them with some attention, and had condescended to say that his daughter Elinora would be delighted to see them. Then the houses, and the gymnastic apparatus which Leo attached to them, rendered them tenfold more interesting. At a store in Court Street the enterprising young man had seen them sold for half a dollar a pair; indeed, he had paid this sum for the ancestral couple from which had descended, in the brief space of a year and a half the numerous tribes and families that peopled the miniature palaces on the basement walls.
At this rate his present stock was worth seventy-five dollars—the coveted salary of five whole weeks! In another month, at least fifty more little downy pink-eyes would emerge from their nests, adding twenty-five dollars more to his capital stock in trade!
Leo had already decided to go into the mouse business.
He was counting his chickens before they were hatched, and building magnificent castles in the air; but even the most brilliant success, as well as the most decided failure, is generally preceded by a vast amount of ground and lofty tumbling in the imagination. If the man in Court Street could sell a pair of white mice for fifty cents, and a beggarly tin box with a whirligig for a dollar, making the establishment and its occupants cost a dollar and a half, why would not one of his splendid palaces, with two or three pairs of mice in it, bring three, or even five dollars? That was the point, and there was the argument all lying in a nutshell.
Leo had faith. What would a rich man care for five dollars when he wanted to please his children? He had watched his mice day after day, and week after week, by the hour at a time, and had never failed to be amused at their gambols. Everybody that came to the house was delighted with them. If the man in Court Street could sell them, he could. There was money in the speculation, Leo reasoned, and it should not fail for the want of a fair trial.
He could make houses of various sizes, styles, and prices, and thus suit all tastes. He could stock each one with as many mice as the customer desired. He could make a pretty elaborate establishment in two days—five-dollar size; and of the smaller and plainer kind—two-dollar pattern—he could make two in a day.
The palace on the bench was nearly completed, and he went to work at once and finished it. It had a glass front, so that the dainty little occupants of the institution could not get out, and the foe of white mice, the terrible cat, could not get in. This establishment had been intended for Mr. Stropmore; but as that gentleman had not been informed of his purpose to present it, Leo decided that it should be used to initiate the experiment on whose success so much depended.
It was ten o'clock at night when the grand palace on the bench was finished. Leo put some cotton wool into the sleeping apartments, and then transferred three pairs of mice from the most densely populated house to the new one. He watched them for a while, as they explored their elegant hotel, going up stairs and down, snuffing in every corner, standing upon their hind legs, and taking the most minute observations of the surroundings.